I'm very pleased
that the Future's Conference is occurring, and am also pleased that you
have chosen to focus on the shortage of school psychologists that threatens
the effectiveness of our profession. I will first address my essay to
my immediate recommendations related to the shortage, but will then broaden
my discussion to include the ways that we practice school psychology and,
finally, the international repercussions of the work that we do in the
United States.

Recommendation
1

We are a hidden
profession. We have not done well at the very essential task of recruiting
new colleagues into the profession of school psychology. High school and
undergraduate students, caught up in imagining the possibilities of their
future careers, have no sense that there is a professional called 'school
psychologist.' In my many conversations with brand new school psychology
graduate students, I have heard too many stories about how they 'discovered'
that school psychologists exist through accidental conversations at a
party, or by stepping into the wrong office by mistake. Thus, one of my
recommendations to the conference will be that we forge a comprehensive
action plan to make school psychology visible to young people before they
commit to a career. I attempted to do this two years ago when a grant
project placed me in a middle school for two days each week. I sponsored
a booth to talk about being a school psychologist in the middle school's
career day. However, I found that recruiting at this early level cannot
be accomplished by university faculty alone. Faculty don't have easy access
to the right audiences, we're not recognized as familiar faces by the
students and, more importantly, we often cannot talk vividly about recent
experiences with children and their families.

Recommendation
2

We also need
to make clearer commitments to recruit career-changing adults into the
profession and to accommodate career-changing adults in our training programs.
Some of these adults are coming from very different professions (real
estate, military service, banking), while others are coming from professions
whose skills overlap with our own (teaching, social work, or licensed
psychologists.) I have worked with all of these nontraditional students
in my role as a program director, and have come to recognize the unexpected
roadblocks to their training. There are time-limits embedded into our
training and accreditation requirements that make it difficult for an
older adult to meet. For example, my older students often had to do their
internship part time, and so were among the few students whose internship
was unpaid. When persons attempt to enter our profession from related
fields such as social work or counseling, their prior coursework an experience
ca!
n make some training requirements redundant. At one point, I built a special
program for respecialization of school social workers that allowed them
to request waivers of program requirements when they could document that
it duplicated their prior graduate coursework. As a result of my work
in this project, one complaint was brought against me by the state social
worker organization, because I had implied that school social workers
were not already well trained, and a second by a practicing school psychologist,
who believed that I had made it too easy for the social workers to join
the profession. Several of the social workers, too, were criticized by
their colleagues for pursuing additional certification. Discussions between
Division 16 and NASP to discuss respecialization of psychologists from
other specialty areas have also been emotionally charged. On the face
of it, recruiting career-changing adults into school psychology ought
to be a simple proposition. In fact, it is fraught with political land
mines. The profession will need to be clear-thinking about our training
requirements, logical in defining our professional credentials and protective
of our standards for practice while still making it reasonable for dedicated
adult professionals to join our ranks.

Recommendation
3

The growing
shortage has placed training programs under intense pressures, and it
will be important for the Future's Conference to recognize these. Many
states are coping with the shortage by issuing provisional or temporary
certifications to people if they agree to go back to school and complete
their training. The Colorado Board of Education stopped this practice
once they realized that the state had over 60 people practicing school
psychology without full training. Many holders of temporary certificates
believe that they are entitled to unquestioned admission into the nearest
graduate program in school psychology, and exert great political pressure
on training directors if they are denied entry. I have received letters
and phone calls from U. S. Senators and Congressmen, urging me to admit
a temporarily certified student. Protests against my program were lodged
with the state department of education, and the local newspaper printed
letters to the editor protesting our admission policies. An easy way for
universities to accommodate more and more students is to hire adjunct
or course-by-course faculty, and there are programs in the country that
have more courses taught by temporary faculty than by permanent ones.
It is ironic that an increase in temporary certificates in school psychology
can result in those 'temporaries' being trained by temporary faculty.
We could quickly lose control over the quality of our program and of our
profession, unless we find ways to protect the integrity of training programs
under these pressures.

Recommendation
4

The most convenient
way for school districts to address the immediate shortage is to hire
fewer school psychologists, and increase the load on each one of them.
This is a common strategy in rural Nebraska and, as a result, our ratios
have risen very quickly. School psychologists who are, even now, working
under the pressures of rising ratios are having to make critical decisions
about which tasks to keep and which to let go. In my conversations with
these colleagues, I am a strong advocate for population-based services,
which recognize and prioritize the school mental health needs of the population
of students enrolled in a district. Identifying those needs requires that
we step back from referral-based identification procedures and substitute
whole group screening strategies instead. Serving the population requires
that we focus first on the social and emotional environments that our
schools create for the students that they educate, and second on meeting
the special needs of children whose emotional disturbances persist even
in effective environments. School Psychology is one of the few psychological
specialties that can practice population-based services, because our practice
is not constrained by the diagnosis and treatment and income limitations
imposed by 3rd party payers (insurance, courts, social services, Medicaid
or other programs that pay for mental heath services.) Traditional, referral-based
services lock us into a mental health service delivery system that provides
the most services to the 'squeakiest wheels,' fixing one wheel at a time.
As staffing ratios increase, it is increasingly apparent that we will
never be staffed at a level that will allow us to fix all the wheels that
need to be fixed. Alternatively, population-based services could be structured
to recognize the totality of mental health needs within the population,
embed prevention and early intervention strategies into the everyday routines
of schools, and focus specialized services on the most serious needs.

Recommendation
5

Finally, while
I understand that the focus of the Futures Conference will be domestic,
I believe that we ought to conduct our work with an eye to the rest of
the world. Increasingly, the children that we serve have come to our schools
from other schools in other countries, and the practices that we advocate
have become models for practice for other countries. We are an international
profession, and we can learn from and contribute to our counterparts in
other nations. I spend two weeks each year consulting with special education
teachers in rural Nicaragua, and their questions are remarkably similar
to those of teachers in rural Nebraska. I use examples from Nicaraguan
schools in my university courses on population-based services. I recently
had a chance to present at a professional conference at Beijing Normal
University, and the faculty were looking to the United States for leadership
in blending psychology into education. These other countries are working
under ratios that are far higher than ours will be, even under the shortage.
If we cannot find ways to maintain effective services under these less
than ideal conditions, how can other countries hope to do so.